Saturday, June 24, 2006
Verizon’s Ears Are Burning
Today was our second outage since we’ve had FiOS, the fiber optic internet service from Verizon. At least this time didn’t require a call to support, but then if they’d not blown me off in regard to my “and oh by the way...” last time, or not installed in a blatently moronic way in the first place, today would not have happened either.
See, when we got our Verizon FiOS fiber optic phone and internet service installed in Middleboro, Massachusetts (if that sounds stilted and overly much info, it’s for the sake of search engines), in a multi-family dwelling, which is to say, a building of apartments on different floors, the dickhead installer, who seemed great at the time, plugged the power unit into an outlook that was clearly marked 3rd floor. That despite knowing intimately that the installation was for the 2nd floor.
You would think that Verizon and its installers would carefully investigate, consult, ask in regard to what apartment’s power is which, and ensure nobody’s getting plugged into the wrong place. He never mentioned it, and I figured if he didn’t mention it, it was a non-issue. Heck, my understanding was that the service would actually have to be plugged into power in my apartment and a place would have to be made for it near where the phone service enters. Except it enters the cellar. Where the most easily usable outlet belonged to the 3rd floor, because the 1st floor’s spare outlet the landlord plugged the legally mandated carbon monoxide detector into, the 2nd floor’s spare outlet was occupied by a drop cord and the washing machine power cord covered the “2nd fl” label. On the other hand, the 3rd floor was vacant so there weren’t even laundry machines making the outlets harder to access, never mind their being in use.
How hard would it really have been to come up here and ask about where it should be plugged in? How many other places are going to be left with Verizon-induced tenant-tenant or landlord-tenant encounters of the “hey, you’re stealing electricity” kind? Verizon needs to deal with this, and they need to train their otherwise okay support people not to sound like slack-jawed yokels unaware that installation staff can plug the power into the wrong place and that this just might constitute a problem. The support person was like “whaddaya want us to do about it?” Thought I should just string an extension cord because that’s all the install person would probably do if he had to come back. He thought we should be happy that it had power at all, as that’s the important thing.
So back to our outage today. I was giving some doubtful benefit that the outage was an outage, considering the nasty weather. I tried all the usual in-the-house troubleshooting. Then I went to the cellar.
I knew as soon as I saw our hall light was out that the landlord had been here and was probably the problem. We have a 23 watt flourescent in our hall fixture that is super bright and lights the entire stairwell enough to make it safer all around. I leave it on at all times, figuring it’s not costly (I didn’t at first; the 3rd floor people started turning and leaving on ours instead of theirs so I gave up). As far as I know, it is our electricity running it, since there are fixtures logically associated with each apartment, and I am certain there is no “common areas” electric supplied by the landlord on its own meter. Which makes me wonder who pays for the power to the outside light and the cellar lights. My guess is the first floor, and I try to act accordingly. Whenever the landlord comes in to do anything, as has naturally been happening more with the 3rd floor vacant, he turns off our hall light. Probably reflex.
Sure enough, the thing we’d been half expecting had happened: The landlord noticed something plugged into the 3rd floor’s power that didn’t belong and unplugged it. And someone had silenced the alarm that sounds when it’s on battery, from the unit at the opposite end of the cellar. Cute.
This is exactly what I tried to tell Airbrain Dude in Verizon FiOS support would happen if the situation wasn’t corrected. We would be unplugged and service would be down. It was so tempting to call support to have them send someone out Right Now when we got unplugged, but I got out my super nice long extension cord and strung that over from our own outlet. Yay. We’re back.
So hey, if we get any readers who are with Verizon, you might want to check out what procedures exist for powering FiOS service in apartments where there are “that’s not my outlet” issues. It really does matter. Duh.